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One life at a time: Four-year-old girl reunited with family through ILCM’s work
Posted on Mar 27 2017
Four-year-old Mushkaad Dahir made headlines around the world when President Trump’s first travel ban stopped her at an airport in Uganda. She had been separated from her mother, Samira Dahir, since she was five months old. Samira was forced to leave Mushkaad behind in order to get her two older daughters to safety in the United States.
Like her mother and sisters, Mushkaad is a refugee. Shortly after she was born, her mother and sisters got their refugee visas. That process takes years, and the outcome is always uncertain. Now the new baby would have to begin the application process.
Could Samira Dahir give up the visas just granted to her and Mushkaad’s sisters? That would have put Mueahib, now 8, and Mumtaz, now 7, at risk: first, through spending more years in the refugee camp where Samira Dahar lived after leaving Somalia in 2005, and then, because they might never get another chance at a visa.
Samira Dahir made the difficult choice to leave baby Mushkaad behind with a family friend while she and her other daughters moved to Minneapolis. She was told that getting a visa would take less than a year. Instead, it took more than three years.
In January, Mushkaad was finally approved to join her family and immigrate to the U.S. as a refugee. She arrived at Kampala airport in Uganda – just in time to be turned away by Trump’s travel ban. Wearing a new dress, hair braided and hands decorated in henna, Mushkaad was left sobbing in the airport as she spoke to her mother, half a world away, on the phone. An empty room and welcome gifts at the family’s apartment in Minneapolis remained untouched.
That’s where the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) came into the picture.
“This four-year-old child poses no threat to anyone in the United States,” said ILCM Executive Director John Keller. “She is one of thousands of refugees and immigrants who have gone through extensive vetting only to have their lives upended by this unconstitutional executive order.”
ILCM joined forces with some of the most experienced immigration experts and litigators in the state, marshalling legal resources to reunite Mushkaad with her mother and sisters. Their efforts paid off on February 2 when Mushkaad, who was finally cleared for travel, arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota teamed up with the University of Minnesota Law School’s Center for New Americans, Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, University of St. Thomas School of Law, pro bono lawyers at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, Advocates for Human Rights, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota offices on two continents, and Minnesota Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken to find a pathway to humanitarian consideration. Al Franken’s office had been working to bring Mushkaad to Minnesota since June. Finally, after countless dead-ends, nothing short of intervention by the highest-level immigration officials in the Trump administration was able to reunite Mushkaad and her mother.
“If this is what it took to get clearance for a 4-year-old refugee girl, we are horrified to consider what awaits thousands of other children and families,” said Keller on the day she arrived in Minnesota.
Since ILCM and partners first fought this unconstitutional executive order, it has been overturned by federal courts, and when the President issued a second travel ban, that ban, too, was blocked by the courts. However, one part of his executive order remains in effect: the number of refugees admitted to the United States in this fiscal year was cut from 110,000 to 50,000.
For more information:
- After four years and Trump’s travel ban, a child meets her family (Washington Post, 2/3/17)
- ILCM Director John Keller on Overturning Travel Ban (ILCM, 3/16/17)
- Trump travel ban blocked – what’s next? (ILCM, 3/15/17)